VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?

[jbor]

on 5/3/04 6:55 PM, jbor wrote:

> And yet, there's Pynchon's own apparent defence of Luddism -- perhaps the
> most misoneistic and reactionary of all sensibilities -- in that 1984
> article:
> 
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
> 
> I suspect there's somewhat more ambivalence evident in Pynchon's writings
> than some commentators are willing to acknowledge.
> 
> Overall, Brock's social diagnoses are quite apt: both this recognition of
> the inevitability of a government and popular backlash against the '60s
> "[r]adicals, militants, revolutionaries" (272-3), and, more pointedly, his
> "genius" in seeing "in the activities of the sixties left not threats to
> order but unacknowledged desires for it ... etc" (269.5-15: not so
> surprising, I'd say, that this passage has been avoided like the plague).

And note also Brock's understanding of how the small percentage of "tough
cookies" who are "in it for real" and who can't be turned will end up being
"remanded someplace else" -- these are the extremists, criminals,
terrorists, as we've seen -- whereas he's counting on "the other 90%" of the
'60s kids being easy to land (270.21-32), a calculation which is also borne
out by the rest of the novel.

best

> A
> more productive way of understanding the resilience of political
> conservatism in recent times might be to open one's eyes to the flaws and
> failings of the "revolutionists", as Pynchon invites his readers to do in
> _Vineland_.